Into a framework of this kind fables of the sort above mentioned had, it will be seen, not the remotest difficulty in fitting themselves; and it was not even a very long step onward to make Alexander a Christian, equip him with twelve peers, and the like. But it has been well demonstrated by M. Paul Meyer that though the fictitious narrative obtained wide acceptance, and even admission into their historical compilations by Vincent of Beauvais, Ekkehard, and others, a more sober tradition as to the hero obtained likewise. If we were more certain than we are as to the exact age of Quintus Curtius, it would be easier to be certain likewise how far he represents and how far he is the source of this more sober tradition. It seems clear that the Latin Alexandreis of Walter of Châtillon is derived from him, or from a common source, rather than from Valerius-Callisthenes: while M. Meyer has dwelt upon a Latin compilation perhaps as old as the great outburst of vernacular romance on Alexander, preserved only in English MSS. at Oxford and Cambridge, and probably of English composition, which is a perfectly common-sense account based upon historians, of various dates and values, indeed, ranging from Trogus to Isidore of Seville, but all historians and not romancers.
In this path, however, comparatively few cared to tread. The attraction for the twelfth century lay elsewhere. Sometimes a little of the more authentic matter was combined with the fabulous, and at least one instance occurs where the author, probably in the thirteenth century, simply combined, with a frank audacity which is altogether charming, the popular epitome of Valerius and the sober compilation just referred to. The better, more famous, and earlier romantic work is taken straight from, though it by no means confines itself to, Valerius, the Historia de Prœliis, and the Iter ad Paradisum. The results of this handling are enormous in bulk, and in minor varieties; but they are for general purposes sufficiently represented by the great Roman d'Alixandre[73] in French, the long and interesting English King Alisaunder,[74] and perhaps the German of Lamprecht. The Icelandic Alexander-Saga, though of the thirteenth century, is derived from Walter of Châtillon, and so reflects the comparatively sober side of the story. Of all the others the Roman d'Alixandre is the most immediate parent.
Alberic of Besançon.
There was, indeed, an older French poem than this—perhaps two such—and till the discovery of a fragment of it six years after the publication in 1846 of the great Roman d'Alixandre itself by Michelant, it was supposed that this poem was the original of Lamprecht's German (or of the German by whomsoever it be, for some will have it that Lamprecht is simply Lambert li Tors, v. infra). This, however, seems not to be the case. The Alberic fragment[75] (respecting which the philologists, as usual, fight whether it was written by a Besançon man or a Briançon one, or somebody else) is extremely interesting in some ways. For, in the first place, it is written in octosyllabic tirades of single assonance or rhyme, a very rare form; in the second, it is in a dialect of Provençal; and in the third, the author not only does not follow, but distinctly and rather indignantly rejects, the story of Nectanabus:—
"Dicunt alquant estrobatour
Quel reys fud filz d'encantatour:
Mentent fellon losengetour;
Mai en credreyz nec un de lour."[76]
But the fragment is unluckily so short (105 lines only) that it is impossible to say much of its matter.
The decasyllabic poem.
Between this and the Alexandrine poem there is another version,[77] curiously intermediate in form, date, and substance. This is in the ordinary form of the older, but not oldest, chansons de geste, decasyllabic rhymed tirades. There are only about eight hundred lines of it, which have been eked out, by about ten thousand Alexandrines from the later and better known poem, in the MSS. which remain. The decasyllabic part deals with the youth of Alexander, and though the author does not seem, any more than Alberic, to have admitted the scandal about Nectanabus, the death of that person is introduced, and altogether we see a Callisthenic influence. The piece has been very highly praised for literary merit; it seems to me certainly not below, but not surprisingly above, the average of the older chansons in this respect. But in so much of the poem as remains to us no very interesting part of the subject is attacked.
The great romance is in more fortunate conditions. We have it not indeed complete (for it does not go to the death of the hero) but in ample measure: and fortunately it has for full half a century been accessible to the student. When M. Paul Meyer says that this edition "ne saurait fournir une base suffisante à une étude critique sur le roman d'Alixandre," he is of course using the word critique with the somewhat arbitrary limitations of the philological specialist. The reader who cares for literature first of all—for the book as a book to read—will find it now complete for his criticism in the Stuttgart version of the Alixandre, though he cannot be too grateful to M. Meyer for his second volume as a whole, and for the printing in the first of Alberic, and the decasyllabic poem, and for the extracts from that of Thomas of Kent, who, unlike the authors of the great Romance, admitted the Nectanabus marvels and intrigues.